Behind the Times

• I've read a hundred articles about Facebook, and still for the life of me do not understand its utility for retail businesses. Every day someone tells me that TATI should be on Facebook, and to me these suggestions sound a lot like the regular sales calls from Yellow Pages salespeople. On the other hand, in the last year, and much to my surprise, distributors and notoriously backwards bicycle brands have also taken to social networking. And while I realize that this network might not be the right network -- it is after all the middle of winter, so what the heck? It's taken a couple of years to break down TATI's luddite fantasies, so why not?

  TATI Cycles on Facebook.

  If you do have an example or case study of, not necessarily a bicycle shop -- but a single location brick and mortar retail entity -- that has used Facebook effectively and/or in a novel fashion, I'm all ears.